humanodon is right: slow news day. I'm not so worried about Farhad Manjoo's space obsession, but this line gave me a pause: His previous article was called Why Men Should Wear Makeup.I've removed enough extra spaces to fill my forthcoming volume of melancholy epic poetry, The Emptiness Within.
Tongue-in-cheek no doubt, but these little jokes come from somewhere. My guess is that he does have a collection of melancholy poetry. The title poem is called "The Emptiness Within." Rather than fill his big emptiness with drugs, alcohol, video games, poetry, or obsessive love relationships, he constructs superior-sounding typography articles to show how smart and informed he is. I worry for him and his emptiness. I will write him and ask for his poem. I'll keep you posted how that goes.
I had the same thought. I read How To Make Friends And Influence People not too long ago and one of the things that really struck me was the stuff about tapping into the ways that people feel important. Bitterness has a way of surfacing when people don't want it to and it seems to me that a person who has the opportunity to soapbox a bit will naturally also potentially have an outlet for their individual bitterness. Who knows though. Maybe he was robbed by a poet, or a poet killed his parents or something. I'd actually be pretty interested to peek inside the brain of the person who wrote this very particular article, if only to see if this person is as truly concerned about minutia as they appear to be in this particular piece of writing. Heck, I'd gladly write some bullshit about punctuation for a paycheck.Tongue-in-cheek no doubt, but these little jokes come from somewhere. My guess is that he does have a collection of melancholy poetry. The title poem is called "The Emptiness Within."
Rather than fill his big emptiness with drugs, alcohol, video games, poetry, or obsessive love relationships, he constructs superior-sounding typography articles to show how smart and informed he is.
I worry for him and his emptiness. I will write him and ask for his poem. I'll keep you posted how that goes.
I am very concerned about grammatical minutiae, but I restrain myself. I could easily write a short article about the use of "number" vs. "amount" though. It is my current grammatical soapbox. Or "fewer" vs. "less." These are grammatical errors people make constantly. However, I appreciate that no one cares for being corrected, especially in terms of grammar and spelling, and if I'm disagreeing with someone, what they are trying to say is much more important than the little errors they may make while conveying their point. It distracts from an argument to focus on spelling.
Oh, grammar bugs me sometimes too, but this is not even grammar. This is an issue of typography. It's not even an accidental error that the writer is arguing, but a systematized conceptual error rooted in what is by and large, a quirk of outmoded technology. From my perspective, dude is making a mountain out of a molehill because people haven't changed as quickly as he thinks they should because books exist that inform people of the current convention, a convention which no on else seems to place any sort of emphasis on. I'm not at all an advocate for bullying of any stripe, and certainly not of child abuse, but I firmly believe that some people should have gotten their asses kicked more (or even just once, perhaps badly) as children. Now, had the article been framed more along the lines of, "hey, I'm a huge typography nerd and as such, I wonder if my readers were aware of the convention around spaces after periods or full stops? Here's an interesting story of how the convention was arrived at, blah blah blah, here are some other interesting facts about typography, etc." then, cool. Maybe I'm just getting tired of the near-mandatory superiority and snark of internet articles, but a high and mighty article about typography is apparently where I draw the line. To the writer, I say, "No, nerd of the obscure. Lick my nuts and do it well since you're so concerned with details, period, space, space.
Aw, man, I just figured out why I thought I'd read this article before. The publication date on this link through me off, despite the note about Assange at the end. I had. I suppose it is his perspective, or the "voice" he is using to draw readers - come to me, enraged English majors! Your greivances are not unheard! . I read the makeup article. He seems like an interesting - perhaps offbeat - sort of person. I agree it's not a big deal. Mom's a confirmed two-spacer and I'm a one-spacer, mainly because I never found it conducive to my "groove" to hit the space bar twice in a row after a sentence. You did forget an end quote, though :)
After I read this, I gave the one space thing a try. I think it would take a while to get used to, as two spaces is almost a reflex at this point. Perhaps those many hundreds of thousands of double spaces over the years have contributed to my legendary thumb-wrestling abilities. As for that end quote, maybe I'm not done yet! And anyway, ahem . . . and :) I get that people demand a certain standard of written English and that's fine, but with the internet it almost seems compulsive. I think this is odd, since creating text is nearly as natural as speaking for a great many people. People who have distinct speech patterns and often use regional (and social) variations of English that do not conform to the standard. For me, as long as spelling is correct(ish) and the grammar isn't interfering with meaning, I'm usually fine with it. A formal piece of writing is a different matter, but most of the writing (or typing, I guess) isn't formal. And of course, with formal writing there is typically an editing process to ensure that standards are followed, so all that outrage and venting about people writing "properly" on the internet seems so very silly and masturbatory.The publication date on this link through me off
Your greivances are not unheard!